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October 24, 2018

Why Having Coffee Post-Training Is A Bad Idea

This will make you rethink having coffee post-training 👇🏽👇🏽

Every now and then you hear a “piece of advice” touted in the training community that is 100% absolutely bonkers! New trending advice is to have a fresh cuppa coffee post workout. This advice is just plain stupid.

Enjoy my rant here, I get into some weeds explaining the science but all in all, I think after watching it, you’ll be opting for a post workout meal with some Aminos over a cup of Java.

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Hi, I’m markets are being in this video, I’m going to be busting some myths that has recently been circling around by some top level fighter coaches and people who are working with fighters around the nutrition that advice that has been propagated in industry as of recently has been for artists to have caffeine or coffee pacifically coffee postworkout. Now folks, that is absolutely a terrible idea to have coffee postworkout. Um, and I’ll tell you why in just a sick, but the reason why these coaches are recommending that as a way to help recovery or to help at least a glucose uptake inside the muscle. Now, the best way to help glucose uptake inside the muscle will. There’s two ways you can look at it. He’s wanting to have more carbohydrates, but to, um, keep your fighter relatively lean. So their insulin sensitivity is good so they can handle the cubs, but also you don’t need coffee exclusively to uptake more carbohydrates.

So the logic behind it is very flawed. And look at that in a sec as well. So the first point or a couple of things I need to introduce first, I’m going to talk to you firstly about how cortisol works inside the body. Now saying what you understand is cortisol is a blood glucose in mobilizing hormone. So, and the reason why this is relevant is because when we have caffeine, we have coffee, what the. This is our blood glucose, right? And we have coffee and this is why you do want to have coffee preworkout. It’s going to secrete a little bit of cortisol. Now Cortisol is a blood glucose and mobilizing hormone as well as have a bunch of other things. There’s a bunch other roles in the body and I’m simplifying, but one of those things that is a bit immuno suppressive to basically prepare you for the fight or the flight.

So it’s drop. It’s a low form of adrenaline and adrenaline obviously dumps glucose in your body and it dumps it. So you do something with that energy, you know, either fight or flight. Now you’re a fighter, you know that’s great because you’re going to be trained and you’re literally going to be fighting and you’re gonna use that glucose, so cortisol is dumped in response to glucose is dumped in the blood stream and you’re using that glucose. Fantastic. Now too. Then if your blood glucose has gone down, if the logic there is, well, I’m going to increase cortisol again to increase blood glucose again, well, why would you rely on hormones to dump more glucose in the body? That’s it’s a very poor transaction. Why not just have more carbohydrate? Firstly, secondly, we can’t have a conversation around cortisol or training without Turkey talking about the nervous system and specifically talking about the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.

So if you’re a fighter, you’re probably gonna. Spend most of your time in sympathetic nervous system because you’re going to be training, you’re going to be on guard, you’re going to be quite tense. A lot of guys who get into who were fighters, they quite stiff, you know, the quite tense all the time and that’s quite a normal response to being around guys who are constantly trying to punch you in the head, you know, you tend to stay on guard, but here’s the deal, right? The more the sympathetic is pushed, the more we need the parasympathetic to come into play to enable us to recover and basically rest, relax so we can adapt and recover to that training stimulus. So parasympathetic is responsible for rest, recovery, relaxation, and actually getting better from our training. So if we smash ourselves in the gym, sympathetic, we want the reverse.

It’s a ying and Yang balance. If you just keep in this state of sympathetic nervous system, you are going to burn yourself out and help. You might have a great performance in this advice of have caffeine after training. Some guys might be in their twenties, they might be doing it, let’s say for for a couple of months and they might feel great, but all of a sudden, boom, they just get into a whole but they can’t get out of because they’re going to be burnt out. The nervous system is going to be burnt out and it’s gonna be very hard to recover from because you’re going to sustain it for a very small period of time. The problem is that fighters and coaches, I suppose who coach fighters will speak to the ego, you know, stop being a pussy. Stop doing this. It’s absolute nonsense.

You need recovery and a point on that. There is a difference between recovery, recovering from a workout and adapting from that workout and whenever you have the choice, you want to choose to adapt to that workout rather than recover from that workout. And what I mean by the two is you can use recovery methods such as ice baths, for example, which Quinche inflammation, Quinche all the damage, the punches that that you took in that fight, but you’re not going to get a hypertrophy Rafiq effect. You’re not gonna get necessarily any stronger from that. You’re just going to be able to repeat the effort and train again the next day, which if you’re doing skills work or you’ve got multiple fights in the day, you need to get a lot of volume in. That might be exactly what you need to do at that period, but in the off season, you want to allow the body that time to recover and adapt in the workout that when it comes time to push yourself in those workouts, you’ve got a little bit in store.

So sensible training, sensible planning of any fighter. Everything should be looked in context. And I don’t know because it wasn’t stated if this advice of caffeine post-training for fighters is something that they exclusively do, say for example, in a Bjj tournament, if they’re doing over the course of the day, um, that would kind of make sense because they’re going to be sympathetic for that probably that whole day. And they’re going to have multiple fights. They’re gonna need a bit of a prep up before every fight. So I can see some application there. But then you send a confusing method with, you know, if you’re using ice baths and these kinds of things. So it’s not a hundred percent foolproof plan, but certainly in your day to day training, coffee or caffeine, postworkout is absolutely 100 percent fucking bonkers. My name is Margaret turnberry. Till next time, train hard supplements not and eat well.